This is what you need to do to get a high quality translation I have been translating for Gengo for a couple of months now and have had a read through the reviews with many clients complaining about issues with their translation. I basically only ever work on jobs at the Pro level rate of $0.09 because only this rate allows for enough time to produce a quality translation. In regards to the bad reviews: I believe this is a matter of you get what you paid for. If you submit your translation as a standard translation the translator gets paid a measly $0.03 to $0.035 per word which is way below industry standards (at least a third lower than what a professional translator usually charges). Generally speaking, a translator translates around 300 words per hour. This means a translator makes around $9.00 per hour at these rates. In most countries this would be below minimum wage and without any of the perks that come with being employed (annual leave, sick leave, paid public holidays. So, in order to make some money a translator will need to churn out at least 600 words per hour if not more. Hence, the quality of this translation will never be as good as a translation done for the Pro rate of $0.09. Put simply if you want a high quality translation please submit your job as a Pro job and a professional translator will work on your translation. You simply cannot expect a high quality translation at the standard rate. For even higher quality translations, provide as much context as possible and a glossary if needed. Also, if you submit your translation through their system it gets split across different translators. This means that your final translation will be inconsistent in style and terminology. In order to avoid this simply submit your translation in a word document or excel spreadsheet. A professional translator will then ensure style and terminology are consistent across your whole document. I hope this is helpful. Thanks, Your Master educated Professional Gengo Translator

We had been using Gengo for quite a … We had been using Gengo for quite a while. We are a global company, and before we use the translations in our product, we often have regional contacts from our parent company review the translations. Almost every time there are at least 2 or 3 languages that receive terrible feedback from our proofreaders. They have mentioned that it's as if it is being translated by a robot, which leads me to believe that lazy translators just use google translate. We've also had customers write in to our support telling us how awfully things are translated. We've moved on to a much more professional quality service.

Google can provide the same… Google can provide the same translations for 0.00 cents. It's a much better deal, and no, it doesn't matter if you pay for their "higher quality" service, Google can still do the exact same job... why pay for it?

Bad for everyone Imagine that you're translating subtitles to a video, and the person speaking is stuttering, starting and ending a sentence, changing tense, etc. You translate it in line with the tone of the original translation, as well you should. Then the Gengo review comes in and marks your translation as "awkward". "Well, of course, it's awkward, because the original is awkward," you say. The Gengo support team dismisses you with a repetitive statement of, "As a translator, it's your job to make it not awkward." So, when the original is, "I...I mean...I don't know, I wasn't...I couldn't have...I'm not sure I..." according to Gengo, your translation should be: "I don't know." Anything else will be marked as "awkward". This is a terrible experience for a translator AND a bad result for the customer.

Machine translations at human prices This company is selling machine translation at human translation prices. If you actually speak the language natively you'll understand this when you see translations for words like "Sign up" directly converted into phonetic foreign borrow words like サインアップする instead of the natural and correct translation of 登録する. I rejected the translations stating this, but Gengo staff said my rejection wasn't valid and that these were "quality translations." AVOID THIS COMPANY AT ALL COSTS.